Mor Bar Sauma Monastery

The Mor Bar Sauma Monastery was a Syriac Orthodox monastery located between Gargar and Malatya in Turkey. The monastery served as the regular patriarchal residence from the eleventh century until the thirteenth century, and was eventually abandoned in the seventeenth century. It produced five patriarchs and forty-three metropolitan bishops. Between 1074 and 1283 several synods took place at the monastery.

The Mor Bar Sauma Monastery was founded in the mid-fifth century and named after Mōr Barṣawmō, a popular saint amongst Syriac Orthodox Christians, of whom the monastery had the relic of his right arm. It is first mentioned in church history in 790 as the place of death and burial of the patriarch George of Beltan. The monastery became a centre of learning in the ninth century. Muslims were known to visit the monastery and the Islamic scholar Yaqut al-Hamawi recorded that he had heard that the monastery paid 10,000 dinars per annum to the Roman Emperor on behalf of Muslims who had made vows there.

In 969, at the invitation of the Roman Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas, a significant number of Syriac Orthodox Christians resettled Malatya and its hinterland, and...